Abolishing USDA Inspection Laws
By Monica @ 9:12 PM   
Actually, I should have entitled the post, "Abolishing USDA-Approved Slaughterhouse Requirements" because it's not as if a USDA official is standing over every animal as it is slaughtered and making sure it is done right. In this post I discussed the costly nature of requiring animals to be processed in such facilities. Well, I did a little digging and found out just how expensive. It's very expensive. And for very ridiculous reasons having nothing to do with food safety:
Jenny Drake was a Virginia state health inspector until five years ago, when she and her husband moved to rural Tennessee and started Peaceful Pastures, a small livestock farm. They raise free-range beef, pork, turkey, veal, lamb, goat, duck, and chicken -- without jacking the animals up with hormones and antibiotics, as is common practice at factory farms. Their meat goes through a USDA processing facility, as government regulations require -- all except the poultry. And because of those chickens, the Peaceful Pastures have been troubled. Therein lies a tale about government regulation, the decline in food quality, and the end of family farming in America.
"The state says no bird in Tennessee can be sold without USDA inspection of the processing facilities," says Drake. "Here's what kills all of us small poultry farmers: There are no USDA custom-kill processing plants in the entire Southeast."
Drake says she looked into building a small processing facility on her farm, but the cost of meeting government standards made it impossible. If all she had to do were to construct facilities strictly for meat processing, Drake figures she could have done so for $20,000; but as the law stands now, a building that met minimal federal guidelines would cost about $150,000.
"The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, means a small producer has to put in restrooms that are handicapped-accessible," Drake says. "I'd have to build an office for the inspector. That office has to have its own phone line. I'd have to put in a paved parking lot. We have to meet the same physical standards as a Tyson's, and we just can't do it."
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Joel Salatin and his family run Polyface Farms, a highly regarded small producer of meats raised according to traditional farming practices ("like God intended," says the evangelical Christian farmer). Salatin tells a similar story of battling regulators."The code said we had to have bathrooms for our employees. I told them we were 50 feet away from two houses with bathrooms, and besides, we're a family operation: We don't have employees. It didn't matter to them. Then they said we had to have twelve changing-lockers for employees -- even if we didn't have employees."
"See, this is bureaucracy in action," he says. "It has nothing to do with the quality of our meat. They just want to follow the code. This is happening all over the country. A lot of it is being done under the guise of protecting the general welfare and guaranteeing clean food. But what it really does is protect big agribusiness from rural independent competition."
Utterly absurd.Labels: De-regulation, Government Idiocy, Rants and Whines, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
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